A boy who spent 20 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
A life extension for a convicted killer.
An extension to his life in prison.
A man whose crime was caught on video.
The same man who has served nearly 20 years behind bars.
They all stand in stark contrast to the story of the man who had a life expectancy of almost two decades and was still on death row when he was released in 2017.
That man was a teenager who was sentenced to life in state prison after being found guilty of murder for the murder of his father, and who was now an adult.
He had a long road ahead of him, and he knew it, said Mark DeLong, who helped secure his release after nearly 30 years behind the bars.
But, like so many other young men, he wasn’t ready for a life in the big leagues.
“There’s a lot of things that go into this process that are not necessarily good for anybody,” DeLong said.
“It’s a matter of timing, a matter on what we’re doing.
And you can’t have that if you’re not prepared to go through this process.”
He was just a kid, with a life of crime, who was just trying to make his way, DeLong told Polygon.
His family was so proud of him that they wanted him to have a life like everyone else, but they also were worried about his safety and his future.
“He was a kid in a bad place, and the whole point of this program is to rehabilitate these people, to give them a second chance,” said his mother, Marjorie, who had three children with her husband.
They had to make sure they weren’t going to put him in danger.
They were not prepared for what he would do to himself.
He was also a teenager, but he was in the midst of a severe mental illness and his mother felt like they were letting him down.
“When he was arrested, I didn’t know that was a possibility.
I knew he was mentally ill,” Marjory said.
“I had no idea he was going to commit this crime.”
And so it was that in January of 2017, a family member took him to see a doctor.
He was then referred to a psychologist who prescribed him Ritalin, an antidepressant, for depression and anxiety, and an antipsychotic for obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In a few weeks, he was back on the streets, walking his dogs, playing with his friends and enjoying the summer.
“The first few days, I was pretty much the same person,” he said.
Then, as soon as he was discharged from the psychiatric facility, things got a little different.
The following April, he got a call from his mother.
She said she’d seen her son at the police station and was trying to get him help.
But his mother said he was out of her reach.
Instead of being sent back to the juvenile facility, he had to go to prison, where he was kept in isolation for almost a year.
“They were using me as bait,” he told Polygons.
“I had to be the one in the cage with him, because I didn�t know what I was going through.”
It wasn’t until March of 2019 that he received his first visit with the parole board.
He had been sentenced to a life sentence for the crime, but was given a two-year extension to live.
He then had to wait for a parole hearing.
“This guy had been on death penalty for a long time,” DeYoung said.
His case was different than others.
“This guy wasn’t just a child,” Delong said.
He wasn’t a child in a mental institution.
He just had a bad habit.
“We saw this kid in prison, and we wanted him back,” De Long said.
The parole board agreed, and on March 30, 2020, the parole hearing took place.
“What we were seeing, what we were hearing from the parole officer, was that he was a person that was at risk of reoffending,” De Young said.
After more than a year behind bars, DeYoung was finally able to walk his dogs.
But the parole officers still hadn’t seen the same kind of progress in his rehabilitation as they had in the past.
He still had to wear a GPS bracelet to help him follow his parole officer’s instructions, and even when he got out of the prison, the GPS monitoring remained on him.
And there was still the constant fear that someone was watching him.
“If you don’t look after yourself, then you’ll be vulnerable, and that�s what I had to deal with, that’s what I dealt with every day,” he explained.
When he finally did receive his parole, it was a bittersweet day.
“It felt like the end of the world,” he admitted.
He told Polygs about how he was taken from